During the Grammy Awards ceremony on Sunday February 12th, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver were playing a gig in Appomattox, Virginia. The band’s latest album, Burden Bearer, was nominated for Best Bluegrass album, but the band did not make it to the ceremony to see the O’Conner Band win that award. Instead they did what they do best: bringing their gospel bluegrass on the road and around the country (and playing Stonebridge guitars).

I, meanwhile, was sitting in a sauna in Fort Frances, Ontario, wondering why dobro player Josh Swift wasn’t answering my call. I had also decided to skip the Grammy’s and had a feeling that if Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver were going to win, they’d probably have cancelled their gig in Virginia. It’s their 7th nomination, so they probably know how these things go by now.

Josh, as it turns out, was suffering from a severe sinus infection, an affliction I know all too well. Two years ago, I had such a bad case that when I tried to order delivery for dinner, I gave them not only the wrong address but the wrong phone number as well. The pressure on my brain rendered it all but unusable. So it was with no hard feelings that I finally got a hold of Josh the following week as he sat on a tour bus driving in to New York City.

Doyle Lawson on the left with a Furch D33LR. Josh Swift on the right with his dobro.

Josh Swift not only plays dobro in the band, he also owns the studio where they recorded Burden Bearer and have already begun work on the follow-up. With nearly 40 albums since their 1977 debut (and a fluid line-up over the years) Doyle Lawson, at 72 years old, shows no sign of slowing the Quicksilver train down and has started his next record.

“Yeah we’re back in the studio. We find we work better when we, you know, haven’t rehearsed the songs to death. And because I own the studio and we don’t have to pay per hour or anything, we tend to work up the songs right there in the studio.”

– Josh Swift

Despite a list of nominations that could fill a trophy case, the band was still surprised by the latest Grammy nod because of one key difference: Burden Bearer is a gospel album, split between gospel bluegrass performances and a cappella songs. For a gospel album to be nominated in a secular category, now that’s a rare feat.

The story of how Josh became acquainted with Stonebridge Guitars begins with professional tour bus driver Jesse Lunsford a few years ago. Jesse was driving for Rhonda Vincent tour which allowed him plenty of spare time to jam with other musicians at festivals across the country. At a shop in North Carolina known for its selection of instruments, Jesse decided it was time for an upgrade.

“I walked in a music store, cash in hand, to purchase a D28 Martin. The owner showed me a Stonebridge and I’ve never played another brand of guitar … I was stunned, speechless, simply blown away. I knew I had discovered something that was going to be huge.”

– Jesse Lunsford

Soon after, Jesse found himself driving for Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. Josh was initially skeptical when Jesse tried to tell him about the guitar.

“You’ve got to understand, we get this all the time. Frankly most people don’t have the ear to tell if something’s good or not. Every week there’s somebody else who wants us to play their guitar, and most of the time it just sounds like a cardboard box. So this kind of thing just goes in one ear and out the other.”

– Josh Swift

Regardless, Josh agreed to have a look. Jesse took the D32 out of its case and handed it to Josh. Josh strummed a chord, let it ring, and asked “How much?”

“It’s not for sale,” was Jesse’s response.

Josh told Jesse that if he would ever be willing to part with it to let him know. Sure enough, the day finally came when Jesse accepted Josh’s offer to pay twice his asking price.

“I’ve played everything, you know, and hands down this was the best guitar I had ever heard.”

– Josh Swift

A year later in the studio, when Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver began working on Burden Bearer, Josh pulled out his new Stonebridge D32. He handed it to Dustin Pyrtle to try it out. All it took was one strum and as it rang out he asked “How much?”

“It’s not for sale,” said Josh. So he called Todd Allison (Stonebridge/Furch sales rep) to see what might be available for Dustin.

“I thought, ‘not all Stonebridges will sound as good this one’. But Todd was very confident in the consistency of Stonebridge/Furch Guitars and pointed us to a shop in Nashville where they had 20 of them and said we should go play them all. That morning, Dustin sold his Martin and bought a D33 and placed an order for an additional custom D32.”

– Josh Swift

Back in the studio, armed with Josh’s D32 and Dustin’s D33 they begin working on the Burden Bearer album. Here’s what Josh Swift had to say about using Furch guitars in the studio:

“These guitars are an absolute dream for an engineer. For the first time ever, I feel like I’m getting exactly what I want in guitar tone. I’ve recorded every guitar brand you can think of, and nothing out there can touch the power, balance, and sustain of a Furch guitar. I’m not even a guitar player, and I had to own one. I used to have to sweep this frequency and that frequency out of the acoustic to get it right. Now, I add some light compression, and simply turn it up. Just like I tell my friends, there is absolutely NO WAY I could not own one of these guitars. Nothing compares…NOTHING…”

– Josh Swift

Doyle Lawson tracking with Josh Swift’s D32TSM.

Josh’s enthusiasm for Stonebridge/Furch Guitars has made waves around him. In fact, nine of his friends and acquaintances have become owners themselves. Most notably, Josh’s dad who had been playing the same vintage Martin for 30 years, traded in his guitar for a Stonebridge.

“It’s just getting started. The bluegrass community are people who are married to tradition, so it’s hard for a new brand to get traction. But the community also has an ear for quality. Stonebridge/Furch is building momentum and it’s just going to keep growing.”

Michelle Qureshi with her Stonebridge G22CR-C. Photos by Meredith Eastwood.

As I type, a snowstorm is ripping across Highway 401, which runs through Southern Ontario roughly from Detroit to Montreal. I am sheltering from the storm with “Scattering Stars” Michelle Qureshi’s seventh album of instrumental compositions occasionally described as ambient, new age, electro-acoustic and neo-classical.

I would be hard-pressed to find a better fit on a day like today. Charting at #7 on the One World Music charts in the UK and #14 on the ZMR in the US, “Scattering Stars” is gaining a lot of positive attention for the Indiana-based composer and classically-trained guitarist. I for one am enchanted by this collection of pieces, which work equally well as relaxing background music or as compositions to be carefully unpacked.

When you think about ambient music, you don’t often think about the acoustic guitar. But the first thing you hear at the top of Beyond the Field, the opening track to “Scattering Stars”, is the ring of Michelle’s Stonebridge G-22CR-C. She sets the tone for a collection of pastoral and organic compositions with this gently plucked, deliberately paced piece for two guitars, supported by an ethereal pad.

For Crystals, Michelle continues in the two-guitars-plus-pad mode, but creates a new tonal landscape by switching to the electric, building up to one of the record’s rare upbeat moments, briefly channeling Floyd, before descending into a electro-symphonic movement which brings to mind the unearthly world alluded to in the album title.

From this brief diversion (which is built on and explored in the record’s second act), we return to the pastoral realm, with the acoustic guitar singing beautifully at the top of Bridge to Where I Do Not Know, one of the tracks that approaches the realm of “song” with its melodically-driven movements and its relatively concise and trackable structure.

I am fascinated by instrumental music. I am consistently in awe of the ability of ambient music to break free of established structural and melodic convention and to follow a more organic and environmentally responsive path. Listening closely to “Scattering Stars”, it’s clear that Michelle Qureshi knows exactly what she’s doing both as a composer and performer, but I encourage you to listen to the record more passively (at least initially) and allow the music’s natural, delicate motion to lead you along.

Still, it probably shows my bias that Dust, the fifth track, is a standout for me. In some ways, Dust closes the first act of “Scattering Stars” – a short piece for a solo acoustic guitar (supported only by a second guitar in the final coda), Dust shows Michelle at her most economical. The shortest track in the collection, I would call this a song as well, with her Stonebridge singing a beautiful, slightly moody melody played with a slide and showcasing Michelle’s distinct knack for hanging chords that inspire just enough tension to pull us along by the hand.

Michelle spends what I think of as the second act of “Scattering Stars” expanding the sonic template of the album. In Overheard, she uses sampled vocalizations and piano to bring us deeper into her inner world. In Chasing the Wind, she uses a wooden flute to evoke a pre-modern landscape. Stargazer is built around the album’s first appearance of percussion instruments, both electronic and acoustic. Forgetting Tomorrow is the most classical piece, with strings and piano evoking a cinematic effect that works as a perfect closer for act two.

What follows is a triptych of three lengthy pieces which bring the return of her Stonebridge and pull in all of the sounds and textures Michelle has developed throughout the album. Each of them alternate between the pastoral and melodic and the ambient and otherworldly, culminating in Solstice, which rewards three minutes of tense, textural exploration with the release of a chorus anchored by strummed acoustic guitar.

“Scattering Stars” closes with Philosophy, one of the most communicably emotional tracks on the album and one of the most rhythmic, conveying a sense of closure even as it introduces something new and strange to this collection. Michelle Qureshi brings a truly unique sound to Stonebridge guitars (or vice versa), which is undoubtedly familiar to fans of her Music Mondays series on Twitter, where she can be often seen improvising on her G-22CR-C.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: A tourist in New York City stops to ask for directions. “Excuse me,” they say, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The person replies, “Practice, practice, practice!”

Vin Downes never thought he’d get to play Carnegie Hall, though he’s been playing guitar for over 30 years. The story of how he got there – besides the practicing – begins back in his high school days, when he first picked up a Windham Hill Acoustic Sampler and discovered the guitarist David Cullen.

“His song ‘On the Way’ was the first song that changed my brain and made me want to study fingerstyle guitar and composing in that style.” – Vin Downes

After the release of his first album of instrumental contemporary fingerstyle compositions in 2007, Vin discovered that David Cullen, the guitarist who originally inspired Vin’s guitar-playing technique, was living in Reading, Pennsylvania, just a short drive from New Jersey. Vin took a chance and reached out to him to take a lesson on jazz and composition. David replied, inviting Vin to a show he was playing in New Jersey with Will Ackerman, the founder of Windham Hill Records. That was the first time Vin met both David and Will.

After the release of his second album in 2011, Will sent an email to Vin and invited him to come to Vermont to visit his studio, Imaginary Road. Having only met him the once, this email seemed surreal. Thinking it was some kind of impersonal boilerplate email, Vin let it sit in his inbox for a week before finally replying. Within 10 minutes, Will replied back and Vin and his wife were on their way to Vermont.

“Will gave me a little tour, it’s a pretty small space. And then I began to realize that what I had thought was a pretty casual visit was something more like a job interview. He asked me what my future plans were, where I saw myself… then at the very end he said ‘Alright, let’s make a record.’ I was blown away.”

In the meantime, Will had taken some time off of playing live as he began to develop a series of concert called The Gathering – each usually featuring four performers, often two guitarists and two pianists, all of whom were produced at Imaginary Road Studios by Will and his partner Tom Eaton. Once Will began to perform his own shows again he asked Vin if he would be interested in playing together.

“After the first few gigs we really clicked, and now pretty much any time he plays the East coast I’m there as his second guitarist. Even though we’ve been friends a long time now, I’m still amazed once and a while, because he influenced my music so much and was such an inspiration and now I get to play and work with him. He’s just a great musician, a great person and a great friend.”

And that’s how Vin Downes got to Carnegie Hall. In partnership with promoter Jeff Evers, Will Ackerman will be fulfilling his long-time dream of putting on a Gathering at Carnegie Hall, in the upstairs recital room on October 28th. The concert will feature Will, Vin, Lynn Yew Evers, Jill Haley, Trevor Gordon Hall and Eugene Friesen.

“The Gathering is like the rebirth of Will Ackerman’s Windham Hill group of musicians.”

In the meantime, there is no sign that Vin Downes is slowing down. Though he is working at the same level as some of his heroes, Will Ackerman, David Cullen and Michael Hedges, when I spoke to Vin, now in his 21st year as a school teacher, he told me that what he is most proud of is the classical guitar course he has introduced at Bayonne High School, which is the most popular class at the school with a hundred students going through every year. No Slayer, no Bieber, just all sheet music and strict classical technique.

“It’s amazing to see these kids go from knowing nothing at all, most of them haven’t even touched a guitar and have never read sheet music, to pretty quickly getting really into it. Classical guitar is the hardest one, so once these kids get this down, they can pick up any other kind of guitar style pretty easily.”

Vin himself recently switched to playing Stonebridge after he was accepted into the Artist Collaboration Program, initially picking up a G22CR-C in December 2014 at Guitar Tech NYC. While at the shop, he also fell in love with a parlor-sized guitar, the OOM32LM, and began saving up for his own custom deep body version.

He’ll be playing both of those guitars on his next album, which like his last record Unlike the Stars will again be produced by Will Ackerman at Imaginary Studios in Vermont this summer for a release in the Christmas season. The album will feature some world
class guest musicians

“I’ve always been looking to make a great guitar album, so even with some heavier overdubs this time around, that remains the focus.”

When I was in university, I was pretty uptight about the guitar. I thought that using capos was cheating and that open-tunings were boring – to the point that I wrote a couple of pieces of music in standard that imitated some of the chording and motions often associated with open tunings in order to “prove” that open tunings were lazy.

Today I’m a much better guitarist and I use capos and open tunings most of the time. It’s obvious now that I was naive not to recognize the tonal possibilities that those tools provided, but at the same time I’m glad I developed my skills in standard tuning and the more advanced chording required by not using a capo, so that I could have a solid foundation before I began adding these additional elements into my technique.

A technique that pales compared to Kris Schulz, as showcased on his new solo album While the City Sleeps, self-released this past January and being supported by a tour which began on Wednesday, May 4th in Kris’ home of New Westminster, BC and will be reaching Montreal before the month is over.

Now in his 40th year, Kris Schulz, a lifetime multi-instrumentalist with a 25-year career in guitar teaching and one of the coolest-sounding jobs in the world (personal guitar instructor at the video game developer Electronic Arts) has made his first solo guitar record in While the City Sleeps. Coming fresh off the heels of placing 4th at the Canadian Fingerstyle Competition, it’s a record that feels overdue.

Despite a genre going by the slightly-misleading name of “percussive fingerstyle”, While the City Sleeps is a very melodic record, with the well-chosen leading track “Through Your Eyes” setting the tone with a pastoral and uplifting vibe. This tune already shows Kris’ well-developed instinct for movement and his ability to tell an emotional story with nothing but a single guitar.

Kris doesn’t stray from the single-guitar formula for any of the 13 mostly-lengthy tracks on this album, and while from a lesser performer this would be tiresome, here it is very welcome. The second track “Sagroovian Juice” begins similarly low-key, with arpeggiated chords only subtly suggesting a tonal shift from the opener, until about 30 seconds in when the tune jumps to a much more aggressively played bluesy groove interspersed with a harmonic-heavy section showcasing Kris’ ability to play lead, rhythm and percussion parts simultaneously.

Strange as it sounds, since this is a solo guitar record, While the City Sleeps showcases the fact that Kris is a multi-instrumentalist by trade. Though the common association of percussive fingerstyle with metal music is well-earned, and Kris does indeed have a background in metal, the musicality at work here is so effective because it clearly draws from so many genres, techniques and influences.

That being said, the third track “Circadian Rhythms” could be easily called acoustic metal. The melodies, guitarmonies, time signatures, and multi-movement structure all fit what you’d expect from metal, except that it’s played on a single unamplified instrument.

Not one to be easily-defined, though, Kris immediately moves away from that sound with “Dave the Grizzly”, which is the most memorable track for me, perhaps because it’s the one that comes across the most as a “song”, a term I typically avoid using to describe instrumental music. It follows a distinct lead melody and has a defined verse and chorus, and the music is mournful, almost funereal, and quite beautiful.

With other highlights including the title track, the folky “Larch Hill”, and the what-would-Radiohead-do-with-a-single-acoustic-guitar “Gray Never Felt So Good” this is a remarkably consistent record, a little lengthy but with no skippable tracks, beautifully recorded and perfect for any number of moods

As for the performance, you could do no better than to catch Kris at Schulz at one of his upcoming shows across Canada:

Before listening to a record for the first time, I don’t like to read too much about it. This was the case when I first heard Dave Gunning’s latest album, Lift, which brought me back to a chilly night in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. It was the night I stumbled by chance into a theatre where J.P. Cormier was playing, when I was so visibly entranced by the songs and his virtuosic playing that the usher allowed me to stand at the back of the room and listen despite not having a ticket to the sold out show.

In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Dave’s songs reminded me of this night. As it turns out, J.P. Cormier played on Lift and Dave has worked as a producer with him. I’m sure the texture of Dave’s production and J.P.’s playing helped me to reach that comparison, but more than that it’s the timeless construction and quality of the songs that had me identifying Dave Gunning as a member of an elite group of east coast tunesmiths along with the likes of J.P. Cormier, Catherine Maclellan and David Francey.

Lift is an album laced with nostalgia. From the opening track, “They Don’t Do That No More”, a lament for a slower, more natural way of life that has gone by the wayside, nearly every song on Lift considers what we may be leaving behind in the endless march of progress. Dave is constantly looking over his shoulder to the proverbial Good Old Days, but he doesn’t stray too far from honest, personal material for his stories to feel disconnected from modern ears.

Like all great balladeers, Dave’s songs have a strong sense of place. Even the songs with titles pointing to far-away places, “Pasadena” and “Alberta Gold”, speak of Maritimers out of their element, and it’s hard to picture any of the stories taking place more than a stone’s throw from the Atlantic. The imagery in “Breaker’s Yard”, salty wind and ferris wheels, is especially vivid and makes it a highlight of the album for me.

Dave breaks from the mold for the song “Sing It Louder”, a call-to-arms protest song consciously written in the style of Pete Seeger. Perhaps for that reason, this track doesn’t resonate as well with me as the rest of the album. In imitating Guthrie’s style, Dave sacrifices some of his own distinctive voice, resulting in a song that lacks specificity and narrative drive. While this is a politically charged album, in most of the tracks the politics are couched in believable stories about people and places, and the songs are stronger for that.

The instrumentation throughout is tastefully sparse, performed primarily by Dave himself on guitar, bass and banjo with a few guests thrown in to provide a little bit of colour and textural variety in the form of some fiddle, steel and harmony, most fully realized on the stand-out track “I Robbed the Co. Store”. With a few exceptions, the album is a essentially a guitar and voice album, showcasing the strength of Dave’s songs and performance and providing an experience very close to seeing the man live.

As I lover of the great Canadian folk song, I think this is the best way to hear a collection of tunes such as this. The textures and arrangements are used conservatively, only as needed to support and augment the lyrics and melody, the real meat of the music. With Lift, he has managed what few have pulled off, to make a record that sits firmly within the folk tradition while remaining contemporary and relevant. By stripping away the artifice Dave Gunning has created an immediate and deeply human album.

Dave plays a Stonebridge G25CC (grand auditorium, cedar top, cocobolo back and sides), a OOM30SM (the guitar in the feature photo), and a 12 string.

1. They Don’t Do That No More
2. A Tractor
3. This Changin’ Wind
4. Sing It Louder
5. Breakers’ Yard
6. A Halo That Fits
7. I Robbed The Company Store
8. From On Higher Ground
9. Love Fell In
10. Alberta Gold
11. Pasadena
12. The Red Onion
13. To Be With You